


The Sound of Silent Promises

by fadagaski



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Gen, max's point of view, movie filler
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-06
Updated: 2015-09-06
Packaged: 2018-04-19 08:53:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4740362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fadagaski/pseuds/fadagaski
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Max's perspective in the movie from the point Furiosa whispers "Can I talk to you?" to the moment they clench hands.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Sound of Silent Promises

Under the light of a fat milky moon, Max picks out the skull of Citadel in droplets of his own blood. Fitting, he thinks, for how much that place has cost him. Wind drifts lazily off the salt flats, stirring a flash of memory – waves, and sea weed, and a voice: “C’mon Pa! Let’s go!”

Furiosa’s feet are not deliberately quiet when she comes up behind him. The blanket shushes across the sand. 

“Can I talk to you?” she whispers. Steps away. Expecting him to follow. 

She’s a different woman now from the demon he first met, thrusting a shotgun under his jaw without hesitation. She has shrunk into herself. The blanket swaddles her like a child. He stands a step behind her, all the same, as they scan the horizon. It’s a desolate wasteland, even more so than the place they’ve left behind. Nothing but white salt to the unbroken line where earth meets oil-black sky. 

“I’ve talked with the others,” she says, a small shake of her head almost imperceptible. “We’ll never have a better chance to make it across the salt.”

He’d like to say he’s surprised, but from the moment she fell to her knees in the sand dunes and screamed with loss, he’d expected something like this. The trajectory of her thoughts pierces him like a bullet. She’d made a promise to the wives. No home to go to. Can’t wait here to die. Gotta keep moving. 

“If we leave the rig here, load the bikes up with as much as we can, we can maybe ride for a hundred and sixty days.” 

‘If’. ‘Maybe’. There’s an aching quality to her voice that makes his teeth clench. She’s grasping for some imaginary destination; always she had the Green Place to aim for, but now there is nothing. 

“One of those bikes is yours,” she says, turning to him. “Fully loaded.” That does surprise him. They’re going to make a crazy dash over the salt and she is giving supplies away. Ducking her head, she adds, softly, “You’re more than welcome to come with us.” Catches his eye. Holds it. She’s split open, dismantled, a rifle stripped to useless parts. 

She knows his game, knows he’s a survivor first and foremost. If he chooses to ride with her, he validates her choice. But that road leads to death – a scorching, desiccating kind of death. He shakes his head. “No, I make my own way,” Max says. If he’d wanted to die, he’d have put a bullet in his brain a long time and shut his ghosts up for good. 

Furiosa turns away, shoulders dropping. Another hope crushed. He looks her over once; she doesn’t seem the suicidal type, but that’s exactly what this is, though he wonders if she’s been honest with herself about that. 

She huffs like she expected the hit and makes to leave. He opens his mouth almost before he realises it, but he needs to warn her. He has to make her see.

“Y’know, hope is a mistake.”

She halts, looks over her shoulder. They catch eyes again, but he can’t hold her gaze. He is further down this road than she, and looking at her is like looking back at himself when he was whole. 

“If you can’t fix what’s broken, you’ll – uh – you’ll go insane.” The voices. The voices will haunt her, as they haunt him. 

Furiosa walks away. He doesn’t know how much she understood. Hope will break a man more assuredly than torture. He is testament to that.

Max sleeps in the rig. The metal cradles him, comforting and familiar, even if it isn’t his car. There are the usual dreams – rotting corpses that tear at his body, war parties on the road mowing down all in their path – but spaced between is a disjointed memory, when white-painted Warboys and ghosts long-dead chased him through dank tunnels into the sun … and he glimpsed more green than he had seen in years. 

He kicks the dashboard when he jerks awake, and the noise is loud in this desert. For a second he holds his breath, waiting, waiting. Nothing stirs beyond the cab door. Air hisses between his teeth. Slowly his heart rate drops. 

The memory of the Citadel’s green gardens sprouting hundreds of feet above the ground pulses in the centre of his mind. So much green, all in the hands of one selfish monster of a man. Imagine what the Vuvalini could do with a place like that. Imagine what Furiosa could do. 

Without conscious thought, a plan resolves itself. It’s a stupid plan. Ridiculously risky. Max tries not to think about it, tries to drown it out with thoughts of his next direction, whether he will go left or right from the rig. It comes back like infection in a bullet hole. Furiosa has always aimed herself at the Green Place, but green is right behind them – and only Joe and his three war parties stands in their way. 

“Max,” says a voice suddenly from the back seat. He jumps, looks behind. Glory glares at him. “You promised to help us.”

Alone again. He can’t get out of the cab quick enough. 

The sky lightens from glittering black to gunmetal grey. The Vuvalini are up, packing away the camp, while the girls and the Warboy unload supplies from the rig. Max pitches right in beside them, hauling full containers of water and guzzoline and Mother’s Milk to the waiting bikes, lashing them on tightly with coils of rope. The plan burns in his gut.

When everything that can be carried is loaded, the Vuvalini wheel their bikes down the crest of sand to the salt flat. Max stands at the top of the rise next to the rig. Furiosa wheels one of the bikes to him, rocking it onto its stand. She holds the key in her outstretched hand. Everything about her posture runs counter to the woman who tackled him to the ground: slumped shoulders, dipped head, a frown on her face that says ‘Don’t judge me’. He takes the key from her; the metal is warm from her body heat. For a moment they lock eyes. Green and glistening, she is determined to keep moving, even if it leads to certain death. He’s not going to drive down that road with her.

The stupid, ridiculous, risk-it-all plan throbs under his Adam’s apple. 

In the end, nothing else is said. The Vuvalini leave with Joe’s Wives and the Warboy, Furiosa at the head of the pack. Max watches them drive away, until they are a distant smear in the white-grey background, the growl of their engines faded to whispers.

Whispers.

“Where are you Max?” He turns. No one there. “Where are you?” 

Crying. “Help me,” a child whines.

“You promised to help us.” He had. He had promised, and failed. And now, even though the words had never left his mouth, he felt like he was failing again. 

Glory thrusts a hand at his head. He blocks. Looks at his hand like it’s foreign to him.

That’s a new one. 

And in the distance is a figure, too far away to hear, yet the voice carries clear to his ears out of a forgotten past: “C’mon Pa! Let’s go!”

Go he does, and it’s crazy even for him, but he feels more and more sure with every kilometre chewed under his wheels. They’re taking it steady to conserve fuel, so it doesn’t take long to catch them. He weaves between their bikes as they slow, draws crossways in front of Furiosa, kills the ignition. She doesn’t rise to meet him, merely lifts her goggles onto her forehead and waits for him to approach. She knows he’s not here to join her. 

“Alright,” he rumbles, laying the fragile map from his jacket pocket on the decorated gold metal of her bike. The blood-red skull almost pulses against the grimy pale cloth. He draws close, head bowing next to hers, and points at it. “This is your way home.” 

Takes a step away again. She frowns at him, confused. “We go back?”

“Mm.”

“Back?” exclaims the one good with bullets. 

“Yeah,” he says, like it should be obvious. It’s the only choice with a chance of survival. 

“I thought you weren’t insane anymore?” says the blonde one. He could almost laugh at that, but his gaze is on Furiosa. Her eyes are dark with darker thoughts. 

“What are they saying?” one of the Vuvalini says, springing to her feet with a flexibility that belies her age. 

“He wants to go back from where they came,” answers another. Those at the rear of the pack shuffle forwards. 

“Citadel,” Furiosa says in a low voice.

“What’s there to find at the Citadel?” asks another of the old women. 

Max makes sure to look into Furiosa’s eyes when he says, “Green.”

“And water,” Bullets says. He glances at her, like all the rest; any mention of water in the desert gets that kind of attention. “There’s a ridiculous amount of clear water. And a lot of crops.” But Furiosa is shaking her head; she’s an Imperator, she can calculate battle costs with the best of them and this – this will cost too much. She closes her eyes as if to block out the conversation happening behind her.

“It’s got everything you need, as long as you’re not afraid of heights,” Blonde adds. 

“Where does the water come from?” asks the oldest Vuvalini, the one with the rifle that never leaves her person.

“He pumps it up from deep within the earth,” says Bullets. “Calls it aqua-cola and claims it all for himself.”

“And because he owns it, he owns all of us,” says Blonde. 

“I don’t like him already.” 

“It’ll take two weeks to skirt the wall of mountains,” says Bait, looking between him and the back of Furiosa’s head. 

“No,” he argues. He points west. “I suggest we go back the same way we came.” Looks down at Furiosa’s pinched bow, the unhappy turn to her lips. “Through the canyon,” he presses. She shuts her eyes again, leans away from him. 

“It’s open, we know that, right?” Bullets says. “He brought all his war parties through.” 

Max nods. Someone is getting it. “So we take the war rig and we charge it right through the middle of them,” he says, aiming his hand like a knife. “We decouple the tanker at the pass,” gestures with his hands, looks at Furiosa, “shut it off behind us.”

“Kaboom!” says the old girl, causing the others to laugh. Another one on his side, who gets it. He could almost smile. 

Furiosa wears a pensive expression. She’s listening to all the arguments, and he can see it dawning on her. “And how exactly do we take the Citadel?” she asks him, voice rough. “Assuming we’re still alive by then?”

His own answer would have included the return of the four wives and a valued Imperator to a settlement devoid of its reigning dictator, but Bullets pipes up again, and he’s really starting to like the girl. 

“If we can block the pass, it’ll be easy. All that’s left are his Warpups, and Warboys too sick to fight.” A better answer than he could have given – because it’s come from someone else. 

“And we’ll be with Nux,” says the red-head, stepping forward. “He’s a Warboy. He’ll be bringing us home, bringing back what was stolen as he’s meant to.”

They all look to the back of the pack, to the pale flesh of the skinhead Warboy with Max’s blood still pumping in his veins. “Yeah,” he says. “Feels like hope.”

“I like this plan,” says the old girl with fervour. “We can start again. Just like the old days.” Furiosa turns back to face Max, ashen and heartsick. 

“Look,” he says, rolling up his map, “it’ll be a hard day.” The hardest day he’s had in a good long while. “But I guarantee you that a hundred sixty days riding that way – there’s nothing but salt.” He gestures west, and comes to the crux of it. “At least that way, you and me could – together – come across some kind of redemption.”

High chance of death, or certain death? In this Wasteland, those are good options. Laid out before her, he knows what she’ll choose. 

She looks like she’s swallowed glass. She was almost, almost free of it – free of Joe, and war, and the ghosts of her past – but he has turned her about. Like a tank, she’s hard to manoeuvre, but once she’s rolling towards a target, there’s nothing that’ll stand in her way. 

He offers his hand. She looks up into his face with resigned despair, and slaps her hand into his own. She’ll do this, go back, fulfill her promise to save the wives that are left.

He’ll stick by her every step of the way to get her to a green place she can call home. He offers her a small hint of a smile like a brand sealing his silent vow.


End file.
